Turnstile Jumpers Aren’t What’s Ruining the New York City Subway

After decades of galling mismanagement and chronic underinvestment perpetrated by the state transportation authority that owns it, New York City's subway system has spent the past few years descending to a heretofore unrealized state of perpetual disrepair from which it may never recover. Naturally, the people who produce Inside Edition decided this was the appropriate time for them to shine a bright spotlight of investigative journalism on the real problem here: People jumping the turnstile, which their cameras caught on video.

The confrontations the show chose to air are laced with exactly the sort of things you'd expect from busy New Yorkers who are suddenly confronted by a giant television camera over $2.75: a mix of irritation, incredulousness, and outright scorn. After careful consideration, I have determined that the award for best response shall be shared by the woman who calmly asks, "Are you going to arrest me? Are you going to give me a ticket? So what are you going to do?" and the man who says, "You guys aren't cops, right? Okay, excuse me," and then walks away from the microphone in the middle of the reporter's sentence.

Generally, paying for the use of goods and services is something people should do. The problem with Inside Edition's stunt, however, is that it frames fare evasion as the root cause of the system's problems, dramatically noting that the practice cost an estimated $215 million in 2018. This narrative omits, for example, that the MTA expects to face a billion-dollar annual deficit by 2022, and that its president has warned that the system will go into a "death spiral" unless state lawmakers find $40 billion to invest in its crumbling infrastructure. It breathes no word of Governor Andrew Cuomo's staunch refusal to consider raising funds via, say, the imposition of a "millionaires tax" on the city's wealthiest residents. And it elides the fact that fares have risen steadily over the past ten years, even while living in New York City has become more difficult than ever for working people—and while the service on which they depend to get around becomes less reliable with each passing day.

Inside Edition's treatment of the subject also calls to mind the notorious "broken windows" theory of policing, which posits that evidence of unaddressed minor criminal activity signals to would-be criminals that cops will tolerate more serious crimes, too—and therefore that cracking down on things like turnstile jumping, graffiti, and public urination will prevent such crimes from occurring in the first place. The broken-windows theory was pioneered by former New York City Transit Police commissioner Bill Bratton in the early 1990s, and became the city's dominant law-enforcement philosophy after newly elected mayor Rudy Giuliani promoted Bratton to NYPD commissioner in 1993. There is, in other words, a gross history in New York City associated with the stigmatization of fare beating; it will probably not surprise you to learn that although the efficacy of broken-windows policing is, at best, debatable, its discriminatory impact on low-income people and communities of color is not.

Perhaps realizing that harassing poor people and charging them with hundreds of thousands of misdemeanors is a suboptimal use of government resources, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced last year that his office would limit its prosecutions of fare evasion to repeat offenders. For everyone else, turnstile jumping is a civil infraction—akin to a parking ticket—that carries a $100 fine and does not otherwise involve the criminal-justice system. You wouldn't glean any of this from this bit of quasi-propaganda, though, which limits itself to the sort of gratuitous public shaming that serves only to outrage viewers at home without providing any useful information of note.

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